“If presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump prevails at the presidential election, he’s committed to making the US great again by forcing Apple to bring iPhone production back from China to the US,” Liam Tung reports for ZDNet. “So if he were actually one day able to follow through, how much would an iPhone cost and would it benefit the nation?”
“MIT Technology Review has run the numbers on three scenarios for the all-American iPhone, finding that Apple could profitably make the iPhone on its home turf without raising prices by that much,” Tung reports. “Jason Dedrick, a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, estimates the cost of assembly would rise from about $10 per device to between $30 and $40 if Apple were to move that process to the US from facilities in China and Brazil.”
Tung reports, “If Apple were also to bring component manufacturing to the US, it would add another $30 to $40 to Apple’s costs, according to Dedrick, and the final price of the phone would rise at most by $100.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.” – The New York Times, January 21, 2012
Those jobs aren’t coming back.
